'You are a strange lot,' said Alexandra Vladimirovna. 'You've got your own little circle of fellow evacuees from Moscow. And everyone else, everyone you happen to meet in a train or in the theatre, is just a nobody. Your friends are the people who've built themselves dachas in the same place as you have… Your sister Zhenya's just the same. The signs by which you recognize one another are almost invisible: "She's a real nonentity. Do you know, she doesn't even like Blok! He doesn't like Picasso! She gave him a present of a vase made from cut glass. What taste!" But Viktor's a democrat. He doesn't care tuppence for such airs and graces.'
'You're talking nonsense,' said Lyudmila. 'Dachas have nothing to do with it. There are bourgeois philistines with or without dachas, and I prefer to avoid them.'
Lyudmila seemed to be getting annoyed with her mother more and more frequently these days.
She would give Viktor advice, tick Nadya off for something she had done wrong or let it pass, spoil her or refuse to spoil her – and be conscious throughout that her mother had her own opinions about everything that she did. She never expressed these opinions, but they made themselves felt. Sometimes Viktor would catch his mother-in-law's eye and they would exchange mocking looks – as though they'd already discussed all Lyudmila's strange quirks. And it didn't matter whether or not they really had; what mattered was that a new force had appeared in the family, a force whose mere presence was enough to change all the existing relationships.
Viktor had once said that if he were in Lyudmila's shoes, he'd let Alexandra Vladimirovna take charge of the house; then she wouldn't be conscious all the time that she was a guest. Lyudmila had thought this hypocritical. It even crossed her mind that by emphasizing the warmth of his feelings for her mother, he was trying to remind her of her own coldness towards Anna Semyonovna.
She would never have admitted it, but there had been times when she had even been jealous of his love for Nadya. Now, though, it was no longer just jealousy. How could she admit, even to herself, that her own homeless mother had become a burden and an irritation to her? And yet, at the same time, she was ready to give her last dress away to Alexandra Vladimirovna, to share her last crust of bread with her.
For her part, Alexandra Vladimirovna sometimes felt like bursting into tears for no reason. Or she wanted to die; or to spend the night on a colleague's floor; or to pack her bags and set out to find Vera, Seryozha and Stepan Fyodorovich in Stalingrad.
Alexandra Vladimirovna usually agreed with what Viktor did or said, while Lyudmila usually disagreed. Nadya had noticed this and would say to her father: 'Go and tell Grandmama that Mama's been nasty to you!'
! Now Alexandra Vladimirovna said: 'You two are as gloomy as owls. But Viktor's normal.'
'Words, words…,' said Lyudmila wrily. 'You and Viktor will be as glad as any of us when the time comes to go back to Moscow.'
'When you do go back, dearest,' said Alexandra Vladimirovna abruptly, 'I think it would be best if I don't come with you. There isn't really enough room for me in your Moscow flat. Is that all right? Either I'll get Zhenya to come and live here, or else I'll go and live with her in Kuibyshev.'
It was a difficult moment. Everything that had troubled both mother and daughter was now out in the open. Lyudmila, however, took offence – as though she herself were in no way to blame. Alexandra Vladimirovna saw the expression of hurt on her face and felt guilty.
Usually both mother and daughter were cruelly forthright. Now, though, they felt frightened and tried to draw back.
"Truth is good, but love is better" – the title of a new play by Ostrovsky,' remarked Nadya.
Alexandra Vladimirovna looked with some hostility, even fear, at this schoolgirl who could work out things she hadn't yet worked out for herself.
Soon after this Viktor came back from work. He let himself in and appeared suddenly in the kitchen.
'What a pleasant surprise!' said Nadya. 'We thought you'd be all night at the Sokolovs'.'
'How really splendid to find you all sitting at home by the stove!' said Viktor.
'Wipe your nose!' said Lyudmila. 'And I don't understand. What's so splendid about it?'
Nadya giggled. Imitating her mother's tone of voice, she said: 'Go on then! Wipe your nose! Don't you understand plain Russian?'
'Nadya, Nadya!' cautioned her mother. The right to try and educate Viktor was something she reserved for herself.
'Yes, yes, there's a cold wind outside,' said Viktor.
He went through to his room. He left the door open and they could see him sitting there at his desk.
'Guess what Papa's doing?' said Nadya. 'He's writing on the cover of a book again.'
'Well, that's none of your business,' said Lyudmila. She turned to her mother. 'Why do you think he's so pleased to find us all sitting here? He's quite obsessive – if any of us aren't at home, he gets worried. Right now he's working out some problem and he's glad there won't be anything to distract him.'
'Sh!' said Alexandra Vladimirovna. 'We probably really do distract him.'
'On the contrary,' said Nadya. 'If you speak loudly, he doesn't pay any attention. But the minute you start whispering, he rushes in and says: "So what's all this whispering about then?" '
'Nadya, you sound like a guide at the zoo talking about the instincts of the different animals,' said Lyudmila.
They all looked at each other and began to laugh.
'Mama, how could you be so unkind to me?' said Lyudmila.
Alexandra Vladimirovna patted her on the head without saying a word.
Then they all had supper together. That evening the warm kitchen seemed to Viktor to be endowed with a peculiar charm.
Viktor's life still rested on the same foundation. Recently he had been constantly preoccupied by a possible explanation of the contradictory results of the experiments carried out in the laboratory; he was itching to pick up his pencil and return to work.
'What splendid buckwheat stew!' he said, tapping his spoon against his empty bowl.
'Is that a hint?' asked Lyudmila.
He passed his bowl to her. 'Lyuda, you remember Prout's hypothesis?'
Taken aback, Lyudmila paused, her spoon in the air.
'The one about the origin of the elements,' said Alexandra Vladimirovna.
'Ah yes,' said Lyudmila. 'Everything deriving from hydrogen. But what's that got to do with the stew?'
'The stew?' repeated Viktor in astonishment. 'Listen now: what happened with Prout is that he arrived at a correct hypothesis largely because of the gross errors that were current in the determination of the atomic weights. If the atomic weights had already been determined with the accuracy later achieved by Dumas and Stas, he'd never have dared hypothesize that they were multiples of hydrogen. What led him to the correct answer was his mistakes.'
'But what's all that got to do with the stew?' asked Nadya.
'The stew?' Finally he understood and said: 'It hasn't got anything to do with the stew. But it's hard to make sense of anything in the stew I'm in.'
'Is that from today's lecture?' asked Alexandra Vladimirovna.
'No, no, it's just something… It's neither here nor there… I don't give lectures anyway.'
He caught Lyudmila's eye and knew that she understood: once again he felt inspired by his work.
'So how are things?' he asked. 'Did Marya Ivanovna come round? Did she read you any of Madame Bovary, the famous novel by Balzac?'
'That's enough from you!' said Lyudmila.
That night she expected him to talk to her again about his work. But he didn't say anything, and she didn't ask.
17
How naive Viktor found the ideas of the mid-nineteenth-century physicists, the opinions of Helmholtz who had reduced all the problems of physics to the study of the forces of attraction and repulsion -themselves dependent only on distance.